Whether the taunt provoked them, or they tracked him down on their own, Frederick’s creditors did catch up with him around mid-October of 1927. This time, there were no more discussions or negotiations: he was arrested and imprisoned in Angora. His total debt was a crushing 9,000 Ltqs, equivalent to about $250,000 today. Not only could he not pay any part of it, he did not even have the money to buy additional food to supplement the prison’s meager rations. Frederick’s friends and former employees in Constantinople took up a collection and sent him money so that he would not go hungry. Elvira and the boys survived largely on their charity as well. But life soon became so difficult for them that she made a desperate gamble and, leaving her sons behind in the care of friends, went to Europe to find some way to rectify their situation.
It is highly ironic that Frederick’s end coincided with the demise of the Yildiz Casino, whose success had sealed Maxim’s failure. In the spring of 1927, the Turkish government decided to impose new taxes on Serra, which he refused to pay, claiming that his annual levy already covered them. The disagreements continued until, on September 12, 1927, at 10:30 in the evening when Yildiz was in full swing, the general procurator of the Turkish Republic unexpectedly appeared with several assistants and ordered the casino closed. His official pretext was that Turkish citizens, including women, had been gambling there; Yildiz—like the casino in Monte Carlo, which Monegasques could not enter—was supposed to be open only to foreigners. The matter went to trial and rumors quickly proliferated, including that the Gazi himself wanted Yildiz shut down because it was earning too much money for foreigners. Whatever the backstage plots, the Yildiz Casino never reopened, and the palace eventually became a museum. One cannot help wondering whether Maxim might have survived if the Casino had been closed earlier in 1927. But perhaps it would have made no difference: the lesson an American diplomat drew from the Yildiz affair is that it illustrated once again “the difficulties which foreign concessionaires have in their dealings with the Turkish authorities.”
Details about Frederick’s last months are scanty. By Christmas of 1927 he was in prison in Constantinople, where he appears to have been transferred because that is where he had incurred his debts. It was a bitter coincidence that the new owners reopened his former nightclub as “Yeni Maxim”—“New Maxim”—on December 22. They enticed patrons with the same mix of ingredients that Frederick had perfected: dinner, dancing, jazz, an American bar. They would continue to do this for decades to come.
Conditions in Turkish prisons were harsh no matter where a prison was located. Most of the buildings were very old—the central prison in Stambul, which was directly opposite the famous Sultan Ahmed Mosque, had been built in the fourteenth century. Typically, many inmates were housed together in large cells and without regard to the nature of their crimes; someone sentenced to fifteen days for a misdemeanor could be locked up with a hardened criminal who had been given fifteen years. Prisoners were also left largely to their own devices. Bedding, sanitation, and health care were primitive. The quality and quantity of food varied. The ability to buy extra food was always essential.
In late May of 1928, Frederick fell ill with what was described in an official American consular report as “bronchitis”; it was more likely a recurrence of the pneumonia that had nearly killed him twice before. His condition was sufficiently serious for him to be taken to the French Hospital Pasteur in Pera, which was on the Grande rue de Pera, just off Taxim Square and a five-minute walk from Yeni Maxim. The nuns who ran the hospital accepted him as a charity case.
Frederick died there on Tuesday, June 12, 1928, at the age of fifty-five. Because Elvira was out of the country, all funeral arrangements were made by his friends. One of these was Isaiah Thorne, a black man from North Carolina who had worked for him at Maxim and who became his token executor. Another was Mr. Berthet, who had collaborated with Frederick during the ill-fated venture in Bebek and was also one of the boys’ guardians. Frederick left no possessions to speak of.
The following day at 2:30 p.m. Frederick’s body was taken to the St. Esprit Roman Catholic Cathedral in nearby Harbiye for a funeral service. Later that afternoon he was buried in the “Catholic Latin” Cemetery in the Feriköy district north of Taxim, not far from where he had first opened Stella. His sons and some sixty other people attended. There was no money for a permanent headstone, and the exact location of Frederick Bruce Thomas’s grave in the cemetery, which still exists, is unknown. In one of the few American newspaper articles to note his death, he was referred to as Constantinople’s late “Sultan of Jazz.”
Epilogue:
Death and Life
Life was very hard for Frederick’s family after his imprisonment. Elvira learned of his death in Czechoslovakia, where she had gone in a desperate attempt to regain her German citizenship. (Germany would not let her in without a passport, and the closest she could get was Czechoslovakia, which shared a long border with Germany and continued to be exceptionally hospitable to Russian émigrés.) Elvira could not have stayed in Constantinople any longer because of restrictions on employment for foreigners. Her plight was even worse because she was a semi-invalid, and her condition prevented her from doing manual labor. She believed that if she could get her German citizenship back, she would have a firmer legal standing in Turkey and would be able to help her sons.
But to her shock, Elvira found that she had fallen into a new legal hell by leaving Turkey. “If you could have seen the tragedies that has been my life on account of all this difficulties,” she wrote in English to an American official, “you would shudder, at the thought, what a cruel thing law and its application is in cases like mine.” From the German government’s perspective, she had forfeited her citizenship by marrying a foreigner, and there was nothing she could do to get it back while he was alive. Elvira also discovered that she was trapped in Czechoslovakia because the Turkish authorities refused to let her return to Constantinople. Only the painful news of Frederick’s death freed her. In a remarkable act of courage and endurance, she crossed the border into Germany illegally, on foot and without any identification so that she would not be sent back if caught, and turned herself in to the authorities. Now that she was a widow, she could petition the German government to have her citizenship restored. It would take five years, and she would not be able to return to her sons in Turkey until 1933.
In the meantime, Bruce and Frederick Jr., or “Fred” as he was called in English, had known real hardship. They had to drop out of school when their father’s financial difficulties began. Isaiah Thorne effectively adopted them when Elvira was away, and the only jobs they could find were marginal, with “very low” wages, as Fred described it. They worked mostly as waiters in restaurants in Angora and Constantinople, including Yeni Maxim. Both also occasionally found work as “jazz singers” in nightclubs.
And then, suddenly, in a way no one could have predicted, the American government changed its mind. On November 25, 1930, at Thorne’s instigation, Fred and Bruce went to the American consulate general in Constantinople to apply for a passport. Thorne put them up to it because he wanted to help them escape the hardships of their lives in Turkey by taking them with him to North Carolina, where he had family.